A piece from Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies notes how experts across campus are working together to address the complex global problem of hunger. A new book, The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Oxford University Press, August), discusses the problem from numerous perspectives, including medicine, in its 14 chapters. The book's editor, Rosamond Naylor, PhD, is director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, which is housed jointly within the FSI and the Woods Institute for the Environment.
From the piece:
“This book grew out of a recognition by Stanford scholars that food security is tied to security of many other kinds,” said Naylor, who is also William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Food security has clear connections with energy, water, health, the environment and national security, and you can’t tackle just one of those pieces.”
Stanford has a long history of fostering cross-disciplinary work on global issues. It is in this spirit that the idea for the book was born, Naylor said. The book weaves together the expertise of authors from the fields of medicine, political science, engineering, law, economics and climate science.
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A recurring theme throughout the book – also reflected in its title – is the evolving nature of the food security challenges countries face as they move through stages of economic growth. At low levels of development, countries struggle to meet people’s basic needs. For example, Naylor’s chapter on health, co-authored with Eran Bendavid [MD] (medicine), Jenna Davis [PhD] and Amy Pickering [PhD] (civil and environmental engineering), describes a recent study showing that poor nutrition and rampant disease in rural Kenya is closely tied to contaminated, untreated drinking water. Addressing these essential health and sanitation issues is a key first step toward food security for the poorest countries.
Previously: Seeking solutions to childhood anemia in China, Who’s hungry? You can’t tell by looking, Could a palm oil tax lower the death rate from cardiovascular disease in India? and Foreign health care aid delivers the good
Photo by Thomas Wanhoff
